Repent and persist

Meaning

True repentance and impenitent persistence are opposed responses to sin in the main allegory’s final correction. The office of keys releases and declares free those who truly repent; its binding function applies to those who remain impenitent and persist. The distinction is enacted through ecclesial ministry, not simply the sinner privately deciding that the matter is resolved. The binding clause goes further: the impenitent are handed over to Satan for destruction of the flesh, with the expressed purpose that the spirit may be saved on the Lord’s day. The stated saving aim qualifies this severe ecclesial warning; it is not a recommendation for bodily harm.

The English ‘persist in sins’ preserves the force of verharren as continuing in a condition, while wahre buß concerns genuine repentance rather than a specified monetary or bodily penalty. The passage joins absolution with the Supper as means entrusted to the Church and should not be reduced to a metaphor for repeating a laboratory operation.